


heavy metal broke my heart

by charleybradburies



Series: sympathy in the form of you (crawling into bed with me) [2]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Childbirth, Coping, F/M, Family Dynamics, Father-Daughter Relationship, Female Character In Command, Female-Centric, Heavy Angst, Lost Love, Love Confessions, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Not Canon Compliant, POV Female Character, Parallels, Post-Loss, Presumed Dead, Queen Arya, Sexual Content, Twins, Unplanned Pregnancy, War, Wolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-28
Updated: 2014-12-28
Packaged: 2018-03-04 00:34:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2902856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charleybradburies/pseuds/charleybradburies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of all the men in the entire world that she ever could have loved, it just had to be one this stupid. One who thought he wasn’t good enough for her even though they’d been by each others’ sides all this time and she’d told him a million times she couldn’t have given a damn that he was lowborn even if she tried.</p><p>That’s what she tells herself, but it doesn’t help.</p><p>[Arya's POV of 'what you did in the dark']</p>
            </blockquote>





	heavy metal broke my heart

_It’s stupid,_ she thinks. _It’s all so fucking stupid. Of all the men in the entire world that she ever could have loved, it just had to be one this stupid. One who thought he wasn’t good enough for her even though they’d been by each others’ sides all this time and she’d told him a million times she couldn’t have given a damn that he was lowborn even if she tried._

That’s what she tells herself, but it doesn’t help.

It can’t help, because he’s still going to leave and she’s still only just realized how she feels. And even though she could have sworn that his cheeks had flushed a little when he’d seen her in a dress, he’s so stubborn that it wouldn’t even help to tell him how she’d only been able to make herself peak by imagining that it was him and not her fingers thrusting inside of her, and even though she screamed bloody murder at him when he said he’d decided to continue on with this band of Brothers he doesn’t seem to be able to discern why and she wants little more than to just kiss him and make him understand once and for all. But she doesn’t, not for a long time. She purses her lips and keeps them to herself until she absolutely can’t stand it. 

She knows it’s wrong of her, to seek him out like this, but she’s in love with him and she’s never going to see him again and gods help her she needs to know, just once, what it feels like to have her lips against his, and he’s the closest thing she’s ever had to a lover so he should leave her as such whether he thinks it’s proper or not but she knows to her core that even he can’t give a shit about propriety if she feels half as good against him as he does against her. And she does, she knows she does, because instead of fighting her - _I shouldn’t even be meeting your eyes, milady, it’s not proper, you look like a proper little girl, she’s my sister, you can be my forest love, milady milady milady_ \- he takes her into his arms and she’s never ever going to love anyone ever again because there’s not the slightest possibility that anything will ever compare to just how perfect it feels to have him so deep inside of her.

He leaves the next morning. She can’t bring herself to say goodbye, so she sits alone and doesn’t bother trying to keep herself from crying. 

It takes her a long time to even consider that she might be with child, and she only allows the option when it’s been five moons since she’s bled and she’s growing out of her breeches and she’s still heading north but it takes so much longer than it should because she can’t walk for as long as she used to be able. She admits it to herself in an inn in White Harbor when the innkeeper takes her spoils from her hunt and hands her a few drinks worth of coins and asks her when she’s due and she flashes back to Gendry spending himself inside her and her heart aches and her cunt aches and she tells the innkeeper that she’s got about four more moons. He wishes her and the child the best of luck, and she buys a drink, and she cries.

She’s sitting in the same bar where she cried about the baby and there’s a group of armored men drinking and sneering and leering at women and talking about the war of the kings. One of them mutters the name Tully, catching her attention, and their voices grow sober as they speak. 

“Such a shame, ’twas, the Young Wolf and his Queen and his mother - I didn’t believe no man that a direwolf could be killed till I heard ‘bout it - those hollow hill knights, they been trying to fight them Freys.” 

“They all dead now, ain’t they, them brothers?” 

“Aye, every known one.”

If every man of the Brotherhood was dead, then so was she. No one left to know Arya Stark had been a woman of their world, no one left to have any love for her, no one at all, only Jon Snow.

She makes it to the edge of the Wall with what could have been a moon to spare, but she’s lost and weak and the child is kicking, so she sneaks Beyond and prays to every god there ever was that they survive, and by whatever grace, they do. They survive, but this life is rougher than she’d imagined, and she barely makes it inside a cave before a snow that otherwise would have killed her traps her inside of it. There’s nothing inside for her except its bitter icy dryness and some scant warmth, and she can feel herself grow weaker, but slowly the snow starts to melt some. 

By the time the entrance of the cave seems to have cleared enough for her to fit back through, she cannot push herself up onto her feet, and she sleeps most of her days, running around in her head as though she were Nymeria. Though she knows it’s not true, she can do nothing but indulge the fantasy, and she howls and she hunts and it all feels so real that when she hears pawing by the cave’s entrance she’s convinced it’s a dream, too, until a raspy tongue scrapes against her cheek and three pups are next to her, pups just like Nymeria and Ghost and Grey Wind and Lady and Summer and Shaggydog had been, small and soft and warm. 

The pawing continues, and the howling, and it feels not long at all before the cave opens again to their mother, the grey and sweet girl with golden eyes that Arya had known, and the wolves bring her meat, and when the pain inside her heightens, coming fast and increasingly frequent, it’s Nymeria who is with her while she screams. The child is born, a girl with eyes grey like hers and hair black like Gendry’s, but the pain remains, and Arya’s practically quaking with fright before the pups’ nudges at her breasts bring her to the conclusion that there is another to come, and sure enough, a boy with ice blue eyes follows but a few moments later. All her energy fades from her quickly, but she sees Nymeria’s pups licking her children clean and relinquishes herself to sleep. 

When she wakes again, she is alone, though only for a few minutes. She’s skinny again, and she’s swaddled in furs and lying near a fire with the sky above her, the sun waning and stars twinkling, and after she wakes she hears voices, women’s voices, and soon there are others with her and the eldest of them speaks to her slowly as Nymeria and her pups come to rest at her side and the rest of the women look at her in awe.

“Amaya,” they whisper. “Mother.”

“You are the Mother of Wolves,” the eldest says, but Arya protests. She had children, human children, two of them, and they were small and beautiful and hers and her lover’s and by the time Nymeria had guided these wildlings’ healer to her, they had been gone from her. She had been so close to death that the healer had almost left her, but Nymeria had growled and snarled and the healer had carried her to the fire and she had come alive again with a sputter of breath. The direwolves had laid next to her, leaving her side only to hunt, and the women had given her water and what food she could stomach.

She runs with the direwolves, and they with her, and she can outshoot even some of the best spearwives of her group and though she is littler than they, when a Ranger pretends to be lost in order to spy on their developing area, she is the one who takes up a sword against him and tells him off. He sneers that they should have some use for men, and she sneers back - of course we do, ride them like horses and slay them like elk and target practice can make merry in her assembly - and runs her tongue against her teeth and Nymeria growls at him and no man of the Watch dares bother them for a matter of years. 

Their elder passes quietly, leaving the world of men and women in a soft bed with a kiss on Arya’s forehead, and the women sing together as her pyre lights the night sky.

Arya is the one who urges them to expand - they can manage it, if they monitor their hunting closely enough and use the right lumber - and when the men who want to call themselves Kings of the wildlings come to challenge her, the spearwives who had nursed her back to health bear their weapons against their bands.

“Amaya Direwolf,” they say, and when it comes to battle against the undead, it is her title that they shout as they wield their bows and arrows and swords. 

There is a hole in her heart, but she is a Stark, or she had used to be, and she must be brave. Brave, like Robb. Strong, like her lady mother. Brave she is, the Mother of Wolves, and soon enough they call her Queen.

The wolves howl, and she howls, and her women howl, and they build and hunt and battle and pray and when the Lord Commander - Snow, the wildlings know him only as Snow, sometimes with the title Lord thrown derogatorily before the name - sends a small troop to ask their alliance, she declines. 

_We will do no harm to you,_ she says in reply, _if you show us that same courtesy. But you have not shown yourselves to be allies of the Free Folk. You stand to protect the Realm against what lies beyond, but we are our own defense, and we do not take orders from those who consider it an honor to kneel to any a man._

The Watch grows more desperate, but the women and their wolves fight their own battles. 

“Regine Direwolf,” they shout. “Queen of Wolves.”

A woman has come to Castle Black, and the Mother of Wolves demands that her spearwives speak to her instead of any crow, and Snow agrees. This woman is a Snow herself, and her hair is black as coal but she looks very like their Queen, and it is her argument only that convinces Arya to consider an alliance, so she asks the woman be brought to her, with a surety at her side, to lessen the chance of any foolishness. She expects the Lord Commander himself will come, though her demand that the surety be unarmed will be a difficult one for him to bear. It would be a matter of pride, wouldn’t it? Men and their pride. The best of them called it honor, but they gave their lives for it. 

As a girl she had seen her father die from an excess of honor, and as a woman she had lost her truest love because he believed he had a lack of it, and she would make neither of those mistakes, never again. The only names she had to be proud of were those that she had earned, and those could not be lost, not to time nor to war nor ice nor fire. 

Her messengers leave before dawn to bring the crows’ people to her, and her stomach turns the whole day long. 

“Mat Regine,” calls the spearwife who comes to her cave, made to be a study almost like the Lord Eddard’s had been, with torches on its walls and all her records inside it, kept safe by Nymeria’s young - or, if the Queen herself were there, Nymeria herself. “My Queen.”

She turns to look at the dyad which follows Nymeria toward her, and her heart beats nearly through her chest. Nymeria gives a watchful eye to the man, and he pats her head.

“You must be Nymeria, then.”

Arya’s breath hitches. It couldn’t be. It simply couldn’t be. It had been nearly two decades, it couldn’t be.

“You were dead,” she stammers, her voice forbearing and her body practically stolid. 

“Sorry to disappoint, milady.”

His voice may have grown deeper, and his age shows some - he must be nearing forty, mustn’t he? - but she has not a doubt in her entire being that when she meets his eyes, they are his and his alone, and she cries. Nymeria nudges her worriedly, and Arya pats her head and scratches her behind the ears and then takes a moment to clear her throat. 

“Gendry,” she says, her voice barely a whisper now.

“Arya,” he replies, no louder, and the woman at his left begins to laugh incredulously.

“You’re - Father, you’re mad, my mother is gone-”

“Aryanna,” he says firmly, a hand at her wrist, and she regards the woman before her. Arya sees it, her hand is already at her mouth stifling a joyous sob, and as their grey eyes meet a tear rolls down the younger woman’s cheek.

“Which of us was first? Uncle Bran’s always said that it was Robben, but Aunt Sansa thinks it was me, particularly as I am the fiercest of us.”

“Are you?” Arya grins, and Gendry nods to her with his eyebrows raised. _Of course she was._ Arya chuckles. “Aye, it was you, by a matter of moments.”

She steadies herself.

“You were taken from me.” 

“She who found us was my aunt Meera, and she believed you dead, so we have been raised instead as bastards of her husband, your brother Bran. That is the guise by which he brought us home to Winterfell.” 

“Yet-”

“They have my stature, my hair, and her brother, my eyes. Your sister’s suspicions did not go long without assertion.”

“It’s not as though you had competition,” she says, both teasingly and earnestly, and when their eyes meet again it suddenly feels as though it would take a battle’s worth of effort to look away, until this woman, their daughter Aryanna, questions with only a hint of jest whether she should leave them be. 

Arya steels herself, and says, “Not today. We have a war to win, do we not?”, and she takes them to the fire at the middle of town, where they discuss as much as they are able. 

She wakes the following morning with her head on Gendry’s chest and Nymeria’s nose at her breast, and she does her best not to stir until he wakes not long afterwards, though she does let her hand ghost around his still-broad shoulders, wondering if they hold that raw strength they once did. He wakes lightly and without fuss, and takes her lips in his, and her heart sings. 

The war endures many moons. Jon’s men and Rickon’s men and Arya’s women manage to unite, and Gendry beds her nearly every night, in an almost proper fashion. The armies fight and fight and fight again during the day, and eventually the war is won. 

Aryanna is soon with child, and Robben’s wife soon after her, and they wear the name Snow in much the way that lords of the Realm wear their own names. 

There is travel and laughter and snow and love, and the North, all of the North, is alive and joyous with the music of wolves.


End file.
